They have vegetarian sushi too. Unless you’re counting seaweed in among the “seafood” category, in which case you’re probably not going to find anything. Kappa maki is a nice choice for vegetarians or sushi newbies; there’s just the idea of the seaweed to get past, no raw fish though, and some nice cucumber and other bland stuff to munch on.
I don’t get a lot of the “macho” sushi bullshit either when I explain I’m a vegetarian, though sometimes then the “how hot can you handle it” attitude about wasabi comes forward.
As for the comment by a previous poster regarding chopsticks, most Asian foods that I’ve found are eaten more easily when you use the intended utensils; they’re prepared to be picked up with ease (assuming one has the chopstick-handling skills) by chopsticks, or scooped up with broad soup spoons. It’s rather like using the particular flatbread (blanking on the name at the moment) in an Ethiopian restaurant to pick up portions of food and eat, and to sop up the leftover sauce.
Either their food prep methods are bad :eek: or it was the seaweed that you didn’t like. No argument from me here, I never really liked most seafood even when I did eat meat, and can understand the feeling.
I spend lots of time in Japan, and I can’t stand sushi or sashimi. Ick. (I’m with matt on the seafood thing.) Too bad they don’t export some of the other dishes they have.
I absolutly hate California rolls. I think that’s because of the avacado because I like the type of sushi that’s just seafood and rice. When I get groceries from Harris Teeter I’ll always stop at the sushi counter for some tuna, salmon, and eel. Sometimes shrimp, too.
Tequila Mockingbird, no, you’re not the only one who loves uni. Uni sushi with a raw quail egg yolk on it is at the very top of my yummy list. And I also adore natto! I would never push any of it on others or look down on anyone who doesn’t like them, though.
And yes, there are folks who try the more exotic fish just to gross each other out or prove how daring they are. What a waste of luscious seafood!
To learn of this behavior doesn’t surprise me in the least. I’m one of those people that tried sushi and wasn’t impressed. So I’m the one you have to feel sorry for because I’m so uncultured, don’t know what I’m missing, and so forth. Oh, you can throw me a bone and assume that I didn’t have GOOD sushi, because if I did, I would love it.
So, being a non-sushi person, I’m pretty aware of how many people think that eating sushi seems to elevate them to some kind of higher status. I know people who have to make sure everyone in the room is aware taht they eat sushi on a regular basis.
So of course, if you’re already with a bunch of sushi fans, how else do you take it up a notch? Suddenly you’re nothing special anymore, so you have to eat the really EXOTIC sushi to rate!
I absolutely love sushi. I can eat raw fish until I burst.
Too bad the best sushi I’ve ever had was at a little place in Vienna. The place served sushi and a lot of other things as well, including tempura and the Korean favorite kim chee (my tongue wanted out after tasting that cabbage!). They also made an absolutely great horseradish and avocado sauce. There is a restaurant in Missoula that specalizes in sushi, but it’s nowhere near that little Austrian restaurant in quality or quantity.
Sushi in Vienna. Shows what you can get if you follow the First Rule of Eating in a Foreign Country: “Eat where the locals eat.”
Jiminy Christmas, sushi, or saengson hoe chobap in Korean, is not exotic! It’s just ordinary, everyday food,and I can’t see making a big fuss about it. Either you like it or you don’t, and there is no more corresponding virtue to being a sushi eater than there is to being a blueberry eater.
Moreover, there is a lot more to Japanese cuisine than sushi or sashimi. Have you every been to a robotayaki? I don’t know if they have them here in America, but in Japan they’re late night places that grill items on sticks and serve them to drunken salarymen and gaijin like me. Japanese cuisine also has great soups (nabemono) that are warm and filling on a cold day. They also have terrific hot pot (shabu-shabu), albeit borrowed from the Koreans. There are wonderful regional variations; you can get dishes in Hokkaido that you wouldn’t find easily in Kyushu.
And if some provincial ignoramus thinks eating slices of raw fish is a thrill ride, then I propose taking him to a Chinese restaurant in the local Chinese immigrant district and ordering some of the untranslated items, like fish maw, sea slug, cow lung, or snake, all of which I’ve had in Taiwan and the mainland. (I stuck to standard noodle and rice fry-ups in Hong Kong.) Or you could take him to a Korean restaurant, if you have a Korean district large enough to support more than one, and order a Cholla province delicacy, rotted fish, or, if you look hard enough, I’ll bet you can find a place that serves boshintang (dog stew).
Or maybe we can find a Filipino bar that serves balut: duck embryos boiled just before hatching. Mmmmm, crunchy!
What I really miss about Japan is buying the Suntory milk tea in the cola-sized cans. One of those and a couple of the triangular o-nigiri with the meat or vegetable filling from the convenience store–now that’s a good breakfast!
If you’re referring to my post, Legomancer, I’m just making the point that there many non-Western dishes that are far more unsettling to American tastes than sushi. I spent 6 years lving in Asia, so, having gotten used to hitting the local kaiten-sushi joint for lunch ( a place where you grab sushi off a conveyer belt and then you pay according to how many plates you had), I don’t see eating sushi as any different than eating pizza, which was also considered wild and exotic when it was introduced to America half a century ago.
On reading the OP, I flashed back twenty years or so to a sketch on the Channel 4 comedy show Who Dares Wins. It featured a bunch of fat sweaty British idiots in a curry house, all trying to show off their masculinity by ordering the hottest curry:
“'Ere, mate! Make sure mine’s the extra hot vindaloo!”
“Mine’s not hot enough! Put some extra curry powder on it!”
“Curry powder! That’s for girls! I want broken glass on mine!”
And so on. Eventually, they eat so much curry they spontaneously combust, and it serves them right.
Different times, different foodstuffs… same attitude. And a blinkin’ silly one, in my opinion… I mean, what if it worked? Suppose your skills at eating raw cuttlefish entrails impress the perfect woman? Suppose she marries you on the strength of your performance? What then? Are you going to blast her hopes and shatter her illusions by admitting you prefer steak? Or are you going to spend the rest of your life choking down the cuttlefish entrails?
[nitpick]
Pizza mass marketing began half a century ago. It was introduced in the late Nineteenth Century.
[/nitpick] Yeah, Dex says “early 1900s” but I think he’s at least a decade late.
Unless you’re counting seaweed in among the “seafood” category, in which case you’re probably not going to find anything. Kappa maki is a nice choice for vegetarians or sushi newbies; there’s just the idea of the seaweed to get past, no raw fish though, and some nice cucumber and other bland stuff to munch on.